TLDR;

The following versions of the Elitebook also are affected and can use the same BIOS.

Elitebook 840 G4

Elitebook 850 G4

The issue

Earlier today I stumble upon an issue with the HP model Elitebook 820 G4 and bitlocker where during the startup it asked for BitLocker recovery key for no apparent reason.

In this specific scenario the Elitebook 820 G4 was replacing the old model Elitebook 820 G3 and just one week prior the Elitebook 820 G4 was implemented and installed without any issues. (What I didn’t know at the moment was that back then it was running BIOS version 01.03 and now it was running 01.05)

You could either input the bitlocker key and continue or just press ESC 3 times until you got in to BIOS and just press continue and the machine would continue without having to input any recovery key.

During the troubleshooting I made sure that the following things were as they should

Disk formated as GPT and not MBR – Checked

TPM 2.0 was enabled – checked

Legacy support disabled and Secure boot enabled – checked

and so on, there was nothing wrong with the configuration.

Still there was issues that not all the time but the majority of restarts the computer kept on asking for the bitlocker recovery key.

The solution

What I’ve found out was that the Firmware version 01.05 caused the issue. If you are running 01.03 you shouldn’t have this issue and on HP support site they just released a new version 01.06 so I updated and the problem was solved, no more bitlocker recovery key question during startup.

Checking the release notes for 01.06 from HP it also states it fixed issues with bitlocker: